Canvasbacks are hard to come by in Santa Barbara County. I’d chased after a few that were reported in the past few weeks without success, so it felt very satisfying to find four of them (a male and three females) at Jameson Lake today.

I get to go back to Jameson Lake tomorrow. It’s the first time I’ll have been there since @quickthreebeers and I (and two other birders) were there for the Carpinteria Christmas count last January.

At that time there were still some spots that were smoking from the Thomas Fire. I can’t wait to see how the birds are doing.

Some photos from the day…

Birding at Romero Saddle (the last place you can currently reach by car if you don’t have an in with someone) as we waited for our someone to arrive and lead us through the locked gate. Weird fact: After driving an hour to reach this point I can almost see my house down there.

Down near Alan’s compound at the lake, in a spot where many of the trees survived:

A short distance away, a hillside that didn’t fare so well, but is doing a good job of coming back:

Heading out to check out ducks on the lake:

It was a lot of fun, and it’s definitely coming back. The area where the north fork of Juncal Creek enters the lake, which is just around that point in the photo above where the debris boom reaches the opposite shore, was an eerie, silent expanse of ash in January. But now it’s birdy again, yay! We only had a few minutes there, but got the best bird of the trip in the process.

No booth pics, but since everybody else seems to be fond of the Cedar Waxwings too, I thought I’d share the bounty from today. The flock of about 20 is still around and feasts on anything berry in the area. They are so cool to watch!

’’Hidden in an old copy of The Lord of the Rings, a U.K. rare book store has found a map of Middle-earth annotated by J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

The map, found in a book given to Blackwell’s Rare Books, has Tolkien commenting on numerous facets of the world of the popular book series. Most notably is that Hobbiton, seated within the Shire and the home of numerous Hobbits in the stories, is the same latitude as Oxford, England. Tolkien’s annotations also suggest Ravenna in Italy inspired the city of Minas Tirith…’’